Hello, everyone. I don't know if this is necessarily the right place to post this, but my brothers and I are in desperate need of help.

My mother has decided to return to college at the age of 54 to get her paralegal degree. She's attending a local community college and doing pretty well in most of her classes. The one problem she's having is with math. She hasn't taken a math class since she graduated high school, and claims to have a massive mental block about math because of one bad teacher in the 8th grade. She's currently in the most basic math class possible and she's still struggling, not because of an inability to understand the problems but because she actively refuses to understand. When myself or my brothers try and help her with her homework, she'll get frustrated before even opening the book and counter with statements like "When will I ever need to use this in my life?" and "What's the point of learning this stuff?". These math classes are pretty much all she needs to graduate, but no matter what we do we can't get her to calm down and at least try to learn the material. She refuses to go to a tutor at her school or talk to her professor because of her adamant stance that she won't need any of this stuff in real life.

We're all at the end of our rope, and could use some help from people who know what they're doing. Any advice, links, or other subreddits that could help would be extremely appreciated. Thank you all very much!

I would tell her she is acting ridiculous in the absolute nicest way possible. "Mom, I just want to remind you of some good advice that you gave me: a good attitude can make all the difference. You clearly can do math - just from raising kids, you had to calculate budgets, medication dosages, math homework we did not understand, ages, and allowances. I am worried that you are giving this 8th grade teacher a little too much power. That was 40 years ago, that teacher is probably dead [sorry if this sounds horrible!], and you don't have to keep letting her influence you. Try to consciously have a good attitude about it for one week and see if you have a different experience."

I know that I take things very differently depending on how they are presented to me. Good luck!

Well, you've probably pointed this out to her, but graduating with a degree is real life, and if she flunks math, she won't graduate and she won't be able to work as a paralegal as she wants. If that ain't real life, I don't know what is. Tell her to just suck it up, pass this class, and then she won't have to deal with it any more.

You could also tell her that she sounds like my 9-year-old and she should be ashamed of herself. That probably won't get you very far, though.

How basic is said basic math? If she's going into paralegal, isn't that almost a jack of all trades? You'd need to know:

law (obviously)

business (which includes a lot of math that isn't simply arithmetic because if you end up in a law case with business, you can be certain that people did some tricky math to hide their steps)

accounting (quite different from business, as business can go into management, whereas accounting is working with raw numbers)

science (so you at least know how someone got past the ethics committee, which is usually how science ends up in the courtroom)

history (precedents can heavily influence how a case turns out)

liberal arts branches: anthro, psych, socio (to see how human relations play out through time and in macro- and micro settings)

languages: the more the merrier!

linguistics (knowing how a word has evolved, or how it is interpreted in certain contexts, can be the hair's breadth determining factor for many a case)

And that's just some off the top of my head. I would say that the business and accounting aspects would be the most frequent ones showing up in cases.

I'm not too sure what a paralegal does, but I think they're supposed to assist lawyers? From my experience, lawyers work together with paralegals to work through gritty details that go unseen under the average eye, so nifty footwork in mathematics would be a definite asset.

If the average joe could see through the fancy footwork in math, I suppose paralegals would be out of work.

She won't need a PhD in differential mathematics, but she will definitely need to get a basis of her fundamentals. Having a mental block is fine and all, but tell her if she wants to be a successful paralegal who is desired in the job market, she needs to stand out. Considering her age (I don't suggest bringing up the age thing, unless your mother's perfectly fine with discussing her age like my mom is), it could be very difficult for her getting a job as a paralegal with decent pay since she may lack experience and her degree is new.

I would suggest drawing a chart with the above content areas that I've listed and write down at least one real life example (a case) corresponding to them. Also write my explanations (or your own, if they are more elaborate) on why you would need knowledge in, say, history. For example, the case with Enron could be listed under accounting. You can also find other cases linked to the other areas.